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Yesterday was the day that all fans of the Back to the Future movie trilogy have been waiting for. Those who have seen the second movie in the series may have noticed that the characters, Marty McFly, Dr Emmet Brown and Jennifer, travel to October 21st 2015 (any other date is false or part of a hoax) in Dr. Brown’s car, a time-travelling DeLorean. As you can see, we’re still nowhere near the future the movie displayed.

Let’s start with the hoverboard. I imagine the any fan of the Back to the Future franchise would like it to be like in the video below.

Sorry, everyone, this video is a well-made hoax. The closest anyone’s ever made to a proper hoverboard, can be seen in the two videos below.

This one was made by the famous car company, Lexus.

Then we have this one by the hoverboard company, Hendo.

But these are still far from perfect and don’t work on all surfaces, which makes them pretty useless outside their companies’ own skateboard ramps.

Next we have holograms. Remember the commercial for Saw 19 in the movie? Dream on, people! The closest I’ve read about so far, is some sparkly lights and I’m personally not sure if this is a hoax as well or just not well-developed yet.

And the movie, Saw 19? It doesn’t exist, but someone did make a parody film with the same name…

Let’s continue on with Mr. Fusion. It makes me sad to mention that there’s no little container on people’s vehicles that turns trash into enough electricity to power up their engines. This did not stop Toyota from using the idea to market their hydrogen-driven car, Toyota Mirai.

I’m not an engineer, but the connection between Mr. Fusion and Toyota Mirai still seems a bit far-fetched to me…

“But what about the self-tying shoes?”, I hear someone ask. Um, I don’t know how to answer this one. Nike did make a big fuzz about making the shoes, called Nike Air Mag, work before the deadline (which was yesterday), but only 2 versions of the shoe (a Halloween replica Universal Studios had made and a replica that Nike actually made) were produced and none of them do what they were known to do in the movie – tie the shoelaces by themselves, like in the video below.

Nike only made 1500 pairs of their version of the shoes, which were donated to The Michael J Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. The founder of the foundation, Michael J. Fox (who’s also the actor who plays Marty McFly in the movie trilogy) even got to try the shoes on.

But where Nike failed, a fan of the movie trilogy succeeded!

Not only should Nike hire this person, the mechanism needs to be speeded up a bit for the sake of accuracy!

There are more stuff to be mentioned here, like the self-drying jacket Marty and his son are wearing and the refrigerating fruit storage above the kitchen table in their future home, but let’s not waste time on more flaws. Let’s move on to a more important question instead. How come our October 21st 2015 is nothing like the October 21st 2015 in Back to the Future 2? No one answers this question better than Dr. Brown himself.

Those who have met me may have heard me say this once or twice – knowing the future changes the future. Even if it didn’t, you never know what could happen if you tweek something in the past, like saving a woman from crashing into a ravine. Even Dr. Brown knew this and had his doubts, but got used to the idea in the end of the third movie and kept travelling back and forward in time, tweeking it even further in the game. Who’s to say which timeline we’re in now? Not that it matters. Not only is this fiction, but everything in life is not up to destiny alone. We make our own choices in life too. Everything else is coincidental.

Time travel is a complicated concept in any genre and multimedia platform. The more details you bring to the table, the more confusion you’ll end up with if there are knots left untied in the story. I grew up with several movies and TV-shows that were about time travel, like Back to the Future, Doctor Who, 7 Days and Time Trax. It’s a theme that interests me, because you always expect to find a detail to be forgotten or a theory or two about major mysteries that happened in the past and how things might turn out in the future. That’s why I had fun last week when I got a tip to watch Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel. This movie brings up a few of the most basic theories about time travel in a very short, but humorous story.

The story begins with Ray, who joins his friends to the pub after losing his job. After he talks to a girl named Cassie, who tells him that she fixes issues with time for a living, Ray and his friends, Pete and Toby, end up travelling through the mess Cassie had come to fix.

For what appears to be a low-budget movie, this was very entertaining. They kept things very simple and only focused on the theories needed to make a functional manuscript, which is quite an accomplishment! Sadly, it is also the bad thing about this movie. There’s more to time travel than the very few things that happens to the characters and, if you’ve got a good eye for details, you’ll spot the few minor mistakes that has been bugging me for some time now. Still, the movie did bring up the subject of the title – the frequently asked questions about time travel. It just didn’t bring up everything due to the fact that they made the movie too short to display everything.

Short or not, I still recommend this movie on a cozy evening under a nice blanket, with some snacks and a beverage. If the idea of time travel interest you, this movie will most likely keep you entertained. From me, it gets a 3/5. Can’t go any higher without stepping on some pesky butterflies and end the world…